By chance I came across these two different pieces within a couple of days of each other. The first is from an interview with Noam Chomsky (and please don't let that prejudice you one way or another):
[W]hat is really striking to me about India, much more than most other countries I have been to, is the indifference of privileged sectors to the misery of others. You walk through Delhi and cannot miss it, but people just don't seem to see it. Everyone is talking about 'Shining India' and yet people are starving. I had an interesting experience with this once. I was in a car in Delhi and with me was (activist) Aruna Roy, and we were driving towards a demonstration. And I noticed that she wasn't looking outside the window of the car. I asked her why. She said, "If you live in India, you just can't look outside the window. Because if you do, you'd rather commit suicide. It's too horrible. So you just don't look." So people don't look, they put themselves in a bubble and then don't see it. And those words are from somebody who has devoted her life to the lives of the poor, and you can see why she said that - the misery and the oppression are so striking, much worse than in any country I have ever seen. And it is so dramatic.
This - the second piece - is from today's Observer:
Until three years ago I did not believe in magic. But that was before I began investigating how western brands perform a conjuring routine that makes the great Indian rope trick pale in comparison. Now I'm beginning to believe someone has cast a spell over the world's consumers.
This is how it works. Well Known Company makes shiny, pretty things in India or China. The Observer reports that the people making the shiny, pretty things are being paid buttons and, what's more, have been using children's nimble little fingers to put them together. There is much outrage, WKC professes its horror that it has been let down by its supply chain and promises to make everything better. And then nothing happens. WKC keeps making shiny, pretty things and people keep buying them. Because they love them. Because they are cheap. And because they have let themselves be bewitched.
.....
Drive east out of Delhi for an hour or so into the industrial wasteland of Ghaziabad and take a stroll down some of the back lanes. You might want to watch your step, to avoid falling into the stinking open drains. Take a look through some of the doorways. See the children stitching the fine embroidery and beading? Now take a stroll through your favourite mall and have a look at the shelves. Recognise some of that handiwork? You should.
In their different ways both passages highlight the indifference of the relatively comfortable to the sufferings of others, and a question that has been on my mind for many years now: what is the extent of our obligation to others who are under assault or in terrible emergency? I have no precise answer to the question. In the book under the link immediately above, I argued that people unwilling to help others in great need cannot reasonably expect help themselves should the same situation ever befall them - but that this was a terrible ethic to accept as governing our world, though to a large degree it does. At the same time, while most of us - who are not saints - owe more than we deliver, we cannot fairly be held to owe our entire lives, all our energies and efforts; we are entitled to reserve a 'space' for our own pursuits and concerns. That may in part explain the sense of futility individuals can feel in face of injustices too large for them to make a serious impact on, much less to remedy. So, most of us have duties of aid more demanding than we fulfil; even if it is also true that none of us can reasonably be expected to give 'everything' for others. It follows from the assumption that these others have rights to a decent life that we do, too.
The solutions, needless to say, can only be political, depending in each given case on the actions of many people. But adequate political solutions rely for their own part on an adequate conception of ameliorative ethics.